Macbook Pro 16 inch speaker pulsating noise?

I’m due a call today, if you can.. could you send me the link to the gearslutz forum? I’m trying to gather as much evidence of this being a prominent issue which has already been admitted by Apple. I’ve got several emails and messages from Apple staff sent to various people but the more the better!

in all fairness, the advisor I’m speaking to sounded genuinely concerned.. but then again.. it is her job! It’s just a question now of how much power she has to get this escalated to where it needs to be.

I’ll let you know how far I get regarding the refund/replacement in the next 12 months if the issue isn’t fixed.

My case number is 101133386646

I’ll give your case number to the advisor today and hope that this connects some dots for them.

“Couldn’t really look up other issues” isn’t that the entire point of fault troubleshooting? We can search these forums for user created cries for help but Apple have no access to anything on their system. It’s laughable.

There’s nothing that someone in the store could even do. Apart from maybe acknowledge it’s existence. But then you have the noise in the store that might mask it.

Imagine going to a store and replicating it on one of the display MacBooks, that would be an uber embarrassment.

I’ll pass on your case number as well today. If you haven’t already, next time you’re in contact, tell the advisor you’re speaking to that there are multiple forums of people experiencing the same issue. Insist on giving them the numbers in the web address of the discussions. It’s literally got to be put under their nose.

Yesterday I went to an Apple Store and reproduced it on a floor model. Unfortunately with COVID precautions in place I couldn’t just play around with a showroom laptop to my hearts content. Also the space was noisy and I think they put volume limiters on the showroom MacBooks (to keep people from being obnoxious), so recording the sound didn’t work out.

This issue just isn’t impacting enough people to escalate in Apple’s priority... On the flip side this might be a path to a free new MacBook when they’re released ;-)

pgrodon116--

Thanks for sharing your problem solving and your work-around!

Let's hope it solves the problem for Others as well.

Does anyone at Apple support know you have a proposed causal-link and a work-around? You would be doing others a favor if you told them, and/or sent a product feedback:

https://www.apple.com/feedback/

.

Great work Simon. I applaud you for staying on Apple about this. Even myself after hours and hours of support calls and running tests to no avail, I find myself giving up a bit. I was adamant about a refund at one point but they wouldnt budge and said they would first have to try to repair and then send me a replacement laptop THREE TIMES before giving a refund.

I spend $5000 on this maxed out 16inch. I'm a full time music producer and I need to be able to use the built in speakers to check mixes. I shouldn't have to rely a third party interface. It's so frustrating.

I'm hoping that with enough of us alerting them of this issue they will indeed do the software update as they suggested to you. That's the first time I've heard of them acknowledging it as a software issue so that's a good sign.

I have this problem too (detailed with video here).

I sent my computer for repair but the reply was "Our technicians performed comprehensive testing and determined that the symptoms you reported were within Apple's specifications for acceptable appearance, performance, usability, and functionality. Because it was within spec we didn't perform any repairs for those symptoms. Your product passed every diagnostics test we performed."

Because the noise is intermittent, and apparently random, I guess they didn't hear it when they tested it. If they did, I doubt they could have concluded that this audio problem is acceptable.

I'm afraid that I only have a vague response from Apple as they weren't able to discern what the origin of the problem was.

Although they optimistically said that they'll incorporate a fix into a future OS update.

It made me wonder, is this problem exclusive to users of 16" MacBook Pros? Anyone on this thread using a different machine?

No, Pepi_Aly is hearing this one:

https://youtu.be/jvYScIZIEJM

Are you saying that you only hear this in other platforms once you've used the DAW? Do you not hear it otherwise?

Curious...

Well done. Thanks for sharing.

If it was a hardware issue, wouldn't we see it more? I've had three laptops in a row with the same issue.